| Summary: | The rational comprehensive approach to planning has proven unable to reduce urban
poverty due either to the exclusion or to the inappropriate inclusion of indigenous
knowledge in planning practice. As an alternative, this dissertation analyzes (1) the
capacity of local residents to apply their indigenous, contextual, experience-based
knowledge towards the reduction of urban poverty and (2) the processes by which they do
so.
The research was based on an ethnographic case study of a single, low-income, urban
neighborhood, Gondolayu Lor, in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The primary research methods
included: 22 months of field observation, 48 in-depth interviews, 44 oral histories, and a
census of the 275 households in the case study community.
The dissertation found that local residents conceptualized poverty in terms of
multifaceted deprivation, and for the purposes of community-based planning, three
manifestations of poverty were identified for alleviation: (1) land tenure insecurity, (2)
lack of preventive health care, and (3) the inaccessibility of information and reading
materials. Through an analysis of community-based planning efforts in these areas, this
study uncovered a diverse array of social spaces that provided windows of opportunity as
well as obstacles to the community's poverty alleviation efforts. It was concluded that
the capacity of indigenous knowledge depends largely on the ability of local residents to
navigate these spaces. At times, this required commumty activists to redefine existing
spaces, create new spaces, and/or abandon those that were deemed ineffective. It was
also found that local residents engaged in community-based planning in a way not
previously accounted for in either the inclusion or social mobilization models of citizen
participation. This alternative form of citizen participation, referred to as pragmatic
empowerment, was incremental in nature, grassroots in origin, yet practical (as opposed
to political) in its objectives. In conclusion, the three examples of community-based
planning analyzed demonstrate that local residents hold valuable knowledge for
alleviating community-level poverty; however, they were unable to address chronic
household-level poverty. In terms of implications for practice, this finding led the author
to conclude that, in addition to community-based planning, a reliable social safety net
must be provided if household-level poverty is to be substantially reduced in the future.
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